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Ma-Anne Dionisio doesn’t look on her performance as Kim in Miss Saigon as a return to the role she created here in 1993. Because in some ways she feels she’s never left it.

“I’ve been playing Kim on and off for seven and a half years,” she says of her role in the Dancap production, which is set to play the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts later this summer.

“It’s not just a part, it’s a part of my life,” she says, sitting on the terrace outside Balzac’s in the Distillery District.

Even in the glare of the bright summer sunshine, she looks almost exactly the same as she did 17 years ago, when she made her debut here, and certainly not like the 36 year-old single mother of three children: Niko (11), Cody (5) and Anya (4).

“I never get tired of doing it. I couldn’t,” she insists. “It’s always a different story, because the people telling it change and so does the world we live in.”

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It’s also not as though Dionisio has been doing nothing but Miss Saigon all along.

She also toured the world as Eponine in Cameron Mackintosh’s production of Les Miserables, including the historic Shanghai production starring Colm Wilkinson, which was the first English-language musical to be presented in China in 2002.

She was in Stratford’s 1999 West Side Story as Maria, starred on Broadway in Flower Drum Song and Mackintosh also beckoned again, having her take over the female lead of his production of Martin Guerre in London.

It’s been a long and varied journey for the sweetly smiling woman born in Manila on July 16, 1973.

“When I was still very young,” she recalls, “my parents moved to Taguig. It was a small town where everybody knew each other and I loved being able to go from house to house and feel safe.

“My parents were both in business, but my mother always wanted to be an artist and both of them always wanted the best life possible for their children.”

So in 1989, they made the decision to move their family to Canada.

“I’ll never forget how it happened. It was New Year’s Eve, my mother had just come home from a business trip to Germany and told us we were going to move in 20 days.”

And not just to Canada, but to Winnipeg. In January. “That was the easiest entry point for independent immigrants, who had no sponsors, like us. They warned us the weather would be a shock, but to go from 30 plus to 30 minus overnight was too much. The skin on my hands literally burst open and they were bleeding.”

Besides the climactic shock, there was a cultural one as well.

“We came from a very sheltered family, small-town life, governed by the Catholic Church. Suddenly we were seeing tattooed men on the street with Mohawk haircuts and piercings. I ate lunch in the washroom at school because I was so scared.”

Young Dionisio already had something to cling to, however, because she had discovered the performing talent inside her at an early age.

“I wanted to sing in the church choir, but I was only 14 and they normally didn’t let people in until they were much older, but they said if I showed up at 5 a.m. on Sunday, they’d give me a chance.

“I didn’t have an alarm clock, so I prayed ‘Please God, wake me up on time.’ The next morning, at just the right time, a giant cockroach fell onto me and I woke up screaming. I said ‘Thank you, God, for waking me up, but don’t use bugs the next time.’”

Dionisio’s singing career began zooming ahead and she had won a Philippines-wide TV talent show and was poised to become a star when her family’s move to Winnipeg intervened.

“I thought if that was the way God wanted my life to go, I would follow,” she says. “If he didn’t want me to be a singing star, then I would be the best children’s dentist in the world. Why a dentist? Well, I also knew I wanted to be a Mom and I thought being a doctor would take too much time away from my family.”

Dionisio wasn’t kidding. She calmly melted into the background at Tyndall Park high school, music was forgotten and she was studying as a dental assistant.

One day, however, she was singing while she worked and her teacher instantly brought her to the principal’s office, not for punishment, but so that he could hear her.

The magic happened again and she found herself starring in a special cross-Canada musical pageant to celebrate Canada 125. She even opened for Céline Dion in Ottawa.

Someone in the Toronto casting office of Mirvish Productions (who presented the original Miss Saigon with Mackintosh) saw Dionisio’s performance on TV and flew her to Toronto to audition for Miss Saigon.

Even though she was a 19 year-old girl with absolutely no theatre experience, she got the plum Canadian musical theatre role of the decade and found herself being directed by Nicholas Hytner, who went on to run the National Theatre.

“The way Nicholas directed me was like we were on a mission and this show was the biggest thing in the history of the world. That stayed with me.

“Nicholas was very adamant about storytelling. He would tell me that if the end of the helicopter scene, nobody applauded, I would have done my job properly, because the emotional intensity would have been so great.”

There have been a lot of highs like that in Dionsio’s life, but some lows as well. She recalls walking into one audition for MammaMia! and being told “You don’t look Swedish,” and being so embarrassed she left the room, never to return.

And although her children are “the beacon that lights my life,” it hasn’t always been easy being a single mother. “I seem to have a real knack for choosing the wrong man,” she says with just a touch of bitterness, describing the two men who fathered her children.

But overall, she feels “I have been blessed. I keep growing with Miss Saigon. This last time out, the first day of rehearsal in Pittsburgh, I started to sing the lines ‘There is a secret you don’t know. There is a force here I never show,’ and something just swelled up inside of me. A depth of feeling I had never known before. The whole rehearsal hall felt it too and everyone held their breath.

“That’s the power of this show. Still. After all these years.”

FIVE FAVES FAVOURITE PERFORMERS

Michael Jackson

“I always wanted to meet him. The child in him protected the artist in him throughout his lifetime.”

Barbra Streisand

“She’s someone who knows what she wants and goes for it, regardless of what anyone thinks.”

Hugh Jackman

“He is the most perfect musical theatre actor to me. His timing is so precise and he is so true to whatever he is playing.”

Cate Blanchett

“That woman can do everything and anything. She can truly transform herself.”

Sandra Bullock

“I think she’s one heck of a charming, classy lady, with great comedic timing.”

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